“Now, Mr. Wilson,” entreats Sally, the one with the droopy breasts and short hair.
Sally smiles only for visitors. Nonetheless, he would not object to her disrobing and passing those breasts slowly by his face. Even so far gone, he is entitled to his fantasies.
‘We’re never going to get any better if we don’t eat our dinner, now, are we?” she continues. “Just one eensy-teensy bite? Be a good boy for Sally?”
He lets his mouth fill to overflowing with saliva and then he puckers up. That much motor control, he still has. It dribbles over his lower lip, down his chin, along his neck, onto his Johnny top, already soaked. For the past week, his spittle has been tinged with crimson. Finally, this most promising sign. Blood. Welling up from deep inside him, where everything must begin.
“Fucking pig,” she mutters disgustedly.
He has decided he can let them be like this, so damned intrusive and rude. He has far weightier matters on his mind.
Not cancer. They think that’s what this game is all about: the ravages of a terminal disease. How misguided.
He doesn’t have cancer.
He has religion, and the glorious moment of his transmogrification is approaching. His transubstantiation, he is tempted to think, but he doesn’t. It is too early to be so confident. In the final hours, there are still critical hurdles to clear. Still some great unknowns, a roll or two of the dice.
But he is certain he no longer needs their food. He has successfully passed through . that stage. The Lord he is creating will satisfy his hunger, purely spiritual now.
Sally covers the plate, makes a note on his chart about the impending necessity of a stomach tube, then clears the mess away. She snaps the steel rails of his bed back into place. She changes his Johnny and checks his diaper, but it is dry. For over a day, it has been dry, and although his mottled skin is unusually flaky and dry, he does not appear dehydrated. Curious. She will have to ask the doctor later in the week; she makes a note to this effect, too. Then she arranges his rag-doll body against the pillows and layers a fresh sheet over him. They run a very meticulous establishment here in the White Mountains, a very expensive and exclusive one, and they take enormous pride in having everything perfectly spic and span for the visitors.
His visitors this afternoon are two of his grandchildren. He forgets their names. He doesn’t have the energy to bother himself with such trivia any more.
“Merry Christmas, Grandpa,” one of them, the man, says. Wilson can see how painful it is for him to look at Grandpa. How very easily he could vomit, looking at his wasted form, misshapen and twisted like a baby suctioned crudely from the womb.
“We drove all the way from Boston,” the woman says in a forcibly cheerful voice. “Made good time. Less than four hours. We’ve missed you very, very much.”
He looks at her, not knowing if she can see the acid in his stare.
“So how are you feeling?” the first one asks.
He can’t answer, of course. He can’t say, “I’m doing very well... terribly, extraordinarily well, thank you for your interest and your concern. I’m coming along nicely, everything seems to be - right on target, and by tomorrow, the Savior’s Day, I expect to have some mighty big news. Mighty big news, indeed — involving you and the whole rest of the family, if all goes as planned. Until then, why not just go fuck yourselves?”
No, he can only drool, and he does. He can pee, and he does that, too, — a great relieving flood that saturates his diaper and seeps down to the mattress cover. He wonders if they will visit long enough for the ammonia reek of his chemical-laced piss to reach their nostrils. Even now, so far into the transcendent phase, so close to abandoning forever all worldly pursuits, that would tickle him enormously.
One last chuckle. Yes, he is allowed that.
“Mother sends her greetings and says she’ll be up next weekend,” the first one says. He has a vague memory of this man. Something about a clandestine inquiry into the will.
“She says she’ll bring Grandma.”
She, he remembers, but he sincerely doubts they will bring her. His poor wife can’t bear to see him any longer. His decline, to use her euphemism, appears to have been so unexpected. So rapid. So bafflingly radical. The doctors are at a complete loss to explain it — and that pleases him to no end. In less than half a year, to go from a robust man of 71 who’s never had a cold in his life to... to this caricature of a human being. This semi blind, incontinent, jaundiced mockery of a man who drools and pisses and sweats and seemingly not much else, the essence of him now only the most basic of bodily functions, digestive and excretory tracts and not much more. The doctors say it’s some rare form of cancer, but in the very next breath, they admit they can’t be sure.
Yes, it pleases him.
Of course they can’t be sure.
It is part of the plan, but they do not know that some things a man must keep to himself.
“Poor thing,” one of his grandchildren is whispering to the other.
‘It would be better for him if ... it would just be better.”
They are out in the hall, and they believe they are out of earshot. That is not so. Since setting in motion the process that has brought him here, his hearing has become progressively acute.
Like the bleeding, a very promising sign.
“How much longer do you think he has?”
“It can’t be long now.”
They are right, although not for the right reason. It is Christmas Eve, and he is exactly on schedule. With any luck, a few short hours and he will be there.
Christmas. Baby Jesus’ birthday, a holy day he chose deliberately. Even in this most solemn of ventures, he is not without a sly little sense of humor.
“So sad to see him like this.”
“After all he’s done.”
That, at least, is true.
Not long ago, he was wildly successful, at least in the eyes of the world. On the very top of his game, which was the import-export business. He had more money than he could ever possibly spend. He had cars. He had world-renown art. He had summer homes and winter retreats. And in every city he passed through — there were more than he could count — mistresses willing to do the filthiest things imaginable in exchange for an evening’s whiff of wealth.
Ten or so years ago, mortality came knocking.
It was not a loud or insistent rap — a debilitating disease, say, or the sudden loss of a loved one ... if indeed he could claim any of those. It was there fleetingly and then gone, but it was enough to shake Bobby D. Wilson to the bottom of his soul.
This is what happened. He was driving to his Manhattan penthouse one night, an exceptionally rainy April night, when he lost control of his Audi. It jumped the median strip, skidding across the oncoming lanes before stopping on the shoulder. There were no other cars anywhere in sight. He escaped — trembling but uninjured. His Audi was unscratched. He’d been very lucky.
But in that microsecond when he was sure the car was going to flip, or a tractor-trailer was going to appear out of nowhere, or he was going to hurtle off that shoulder into the rocky ravine below, or he was going to be catapulted through the windshield, or any of the hundred other dire possibilities that arced through his mind like a jolt of executioner’s juice, it hit him as never before: I’m going to die. Maybe not today, or next week, or 15 years from now ... but eventually, I’m going to die.
A decade or two younger, and things might have ended there with a sinking realization of futility and inevitable defeat. But a man of his caliber at his age could not let such things end there.
He became preoccupied, then obsessed, with the notion of his mortality. Beside it, his other obsessions — the cars, the fine art, the women — were mere child’s play.
He vowed not to submit. Not without a fight
He would draft a plan, just as he’d drafted the plan to build a financial empire.
At first, he considered cryonics, but any fool could see the potential pitfalls. No contract, no amount of promises or cash could dictate what some slob with his fingers on the switch might do 25, 50, 100 years down the line. What if they shut off the electricity? He’d heard of such things, frozen corpses thawing, warming, becoming fit only for maggots, not blessed resurrection.
He considered a life-extension potion sold at a clinic in Gstaad. He investigated treatments at a hospital in Acapulco. He had his staff look into vitamins, pure oxygen tents, superoxide dismutase, enough supplements and tonics and elixirs to fill a quackery text. But he had not gotten where he had in life without being able to sniff out the rats, and the odor of rodent was very strong from every one of these promised fountains of youth.
Then, his epiphany. It was not the body with which he should be concerned. It was the inner being, the essence of Wilson.
So he’d done what men in his station have done since the species dwelled in caves — he’d turned to religion. Not organized religion. No. He’d been through that as a youth, courtesy of a domineering mother who idolized dead popes and a virgin mother. By his teens, he’d discarded that kind of faith as a colossal hoax, an opiate intended for losers. It was, coincidentally, the only issue on which he and Karl Marx would ever see eye-to-eye.
No, a man like him had to start anew.
He had to create his own god. Any simpleton could see that.
What a simpleton couldn’t see was the only place such a deity could be born: inside, deep within the wellspring of dynamism and fierce individuality that powered the external being. A transcendental, metaphysical process, whose ambition and daring would stagger the most sophisticated intellect.
Of course, a man could not come by his own god without unlocking great secrets. In his travels over the next several years, he sought out shamans and soothsayers and priests proclaiming intimacy with such mysteries. In alleys and temples, on mountaintops and behind curtains, in tents and at dusty bazaars — alone or with the assistance of interpreters — he met with them, rewarding them richly for their say. Later, he would sift and sort through what he’d heard, retaining the valuable nuggets, tossing the garbage, of which there was plenty.
Bobby D. Wilson: God.
A simple but beautiful concept, one’s personal god. Infinitely more exciting than one’s personal yacht, or personal chauffeur, or personal woman.
His plan, when it was complete, involved significant sacrifice.
Every religion did. Sacrifice of respect, however transitory. Sacrifice of mobility. Sacrifice of the bodily functions: speech, manners, fine motor control, continence. Sacrifice of the pleasures of the flesh — perhaps the greatest of all for a man perpetually in love with brandy and having his cock sucked dry. Yet he would not emulate the Buddhists, with their abandonment of self before passage into Nirvana. His plan was not modeled after the Catholics, with their subjugation to the altruism of Jesus of Nazareth. He could not, has not, neglected the inherent concept of self.
On the contrary, self is to be the very cornerstone of his religion.
Such a bold concept.
Looking back this Christmas Eve, he sees just what a gamble it is. How easily it could all come to naught. Tomorrow, the chosen day, he could just as easily die as transcend. By the end of the week, he could be in a grave, not at the center of the universe he would fashion after himself. Yet isn’t all of life a gamble? Isn’t it only the losers who never lay their money down and give the wheel of life a spin?
In the hall, the voices of his relatives fade and are gone, replaced by the convalescent home’s normal background moaning and whimpering.
Through the window, he sees December darkness settling in. When he concentrates, he can actually hear the snowflakes fall. Angels walking across the clouds would make such sweet sounds, he whimsically supposes.
He imagines it is very cold out there, and he’s overheard someone say a good blanketing of snow is predicted. A white Christmas, after all. A very nice touch, he thinks. Very symbolic, in a purifying sort of way.
At 4:30, the lights come on, chasing the shadows away. There is never honest darkness in the home, only degrees and zones of light.
At 6:20 Sally pokes her head in and concludes he is snoozing, all is well.
At 7:35, the strains of carolers from the local Methodist church. They are outside the front door.
At 7:55, the carolers departing in a flurry of holiday cheer.
At 10:15, bits and pieces of Sally talking on the phone, reluctantly agreeing to work a double shift.
At 11:30, the distinctive voice of a man he once adored, Jay Leno, coming from the staff lounge TV.
At midnight, the hail clock striking twelve.
At 1 a.m., nothing.
At 2, nothing.
He is fully awake now, almost painfully conscious. The first traces of doubt are beginning to creep into his mind when he thinks he feels it: a twinge in his chest.
At first, it is only a minor irritation. He’s had worse from indigestion.
But soon, it is a galloping pain. The burning shoots up and down his arms, his legs, through his neck, penetrating his skull. His breath grows short, labored. A heavy sweat glistens his face, his armpits, his crotch. His head feels suddenly very light. Something smells foul, like rotted meat. He recognizes these as the classic symptoms of a heart attack, but he prays that is not what is happening.
Please! he begs.
His body obliges. The pain crescendos, building on itself, until it has blocked all other fleshly sensations.
With a wheeze like the last turn of an old diesel engine, his breathing stops.
There is silence.
Then the neurons begin their death dance, telegraphing his muscles to begin twitching. At first, the muscles merely flex, as if the organism is only mildly annoyed. But very quickly, he is engulfed in spasms — violent, lurching, head-to-toe spasms that rattle the metal frame of his bed with a clatter that can be heard at the nurses’ station. There is a gurgling sound and his mouth gushes blood. His jaw snaps open and shut, open and shut, his teeth clicking, his mouth frothing like a fish yanked from water.
His sweat is profuse now, and it is tinged with crimson. His heart is pumping like a mad thing, pumping so hard his chest actually thumps from the raw power of it. Capillaries are bursting everywhere with the sudden pressure. The veins on his forehead bulge like tiny fire hoses.
Without fanfare, his heart gives up.
His muscles relax.
Immediately, he starts to cool.
From inside the crumpled shell of his earthly remains, he has been observing in an almost detached manner.
This had been one of the biggest unknowns: how would it feel? He can tolerate pain, but there are worst feelings than pain. Nothingness would be worse than pain. A gradual loss of consciousness would be worse than pain. Suddenly encountering a rival god — a false idol — would be much worse than pain.
(Saint Peter don’t you call me, fragments of a long-forgotten song, echo bizarrely.)
But there is nothing like that. His thoughts are pleasant, fluffy, non-hurried affairs. At first, they remind him of riding first class in a train that glides noiselessly through a forest. He is alone, the entire train to himself. Without warning, he is heading into a tunnel. Silent still, the train hurtles along, surrounded not by darkness but by a welcoming bluish glow.
He begins to shrivel, much as an orange will shrivel when left unrefrigerated.
His fingers and toes retreat into his hands and feet. His limbs collapse into his torso, his head into his neck, his neck into his shoulders. His hair recedes to nothingness. His skin takes on the texture and tinge of water-soaked parchment. The process stops when he is the size of a melon, stranded comically in the center of his bed. It is impossible to determine how much he weighs any more, if he weighs anything at all. It is entirely possible he is two-dimensional.
Will anybody notice?
This had been another gamble. He’s had no way of predicting if his god would be visible. That is critical. Even the Buddha, a highly introspective deity, made sure he was seen.
He cannot see himself any longer. But he can hear.
He hears the screams of Sally discovering him. Her panic penetrates, but only barely.
“Oh my God!” she screams, unaware of the irony.
She touches him, lightning-quick, the way she might touch a radiator to see if it were hot. As if somehow that will make the nightmare go away.
It doesn’t. If anything, the thing on the bed seems to be taking on a new form, a new gloss and density. It is shimmering now. It must be getting ready to do something. She doesn’t know what, only that it will be awful.
She has to get away. Yes. She has to get help. They have to stop it before ... before...
She doesn’t finish her thought. Through her fear, she is aware of a new sensation. A humming. It seems to fill the room, resonating off the walls, rattling the window panes and the steel rails of the bed. She has to get out.
Her legs thaw, and she begins to back away from it. She is almost to the door when she can get no further. Yet another sensation: this time, of being pulled. Of being ... suctioned. Slowly, she is being dragged back toward it.
A bizarre image pops into her mind. It is a childhood memory, the time she was very naughty and went after the cat with a vacuum cleaner, chasing it into a corner, the animal leaping and clawing as it tries to evade her, its mewling and spitting when she finally has it trapped. Then, a wicked smile on her face, its tail disappearing slowly inside the hose.
The force is increasing.
She is knocked to the floor. She is bleeding profusely from a cut on her head. She is on her back, her eyes locked onto the ceiling, her face pallid and sweaty. She is trying to grab onto something, anything, but there is only polished hardwood floor. Her fingernails find a crack, and for a moment, she is able to resist. Then the force picks up a notch. Four of her fingernails are ripped off. With a giant whoosh, she is sucked onto the mattress.
Now she is next to it. Now she can feel its intense heat, like a furnace. The heat seems to burn its way through her skull and into her head. Consciousness is singed away. Her last thought is of a cat, its fur on end, its tiny cat’s brain flooded with terror. Foot-first, she is sucked into the vortex of the god he has created. There is the sound of small bones being crushed as her toes disappear inside. The sounds are louder as if consumes her shins, knees, upper legs, hips, ribs, neck. It’s as if she were being fed through an invisible rolling mill, a sheet of textile disappearing into the bowels of a finishing plant.
It is over. There is no trace of the sacrifice: no blood, no flecks of tissue, no bits or pieces of skeleton or bone. A faint odor that could be electricity is all that remains.
Sally has achieved sainthood. Saint Sally, the floppy-fitted.
Let us pray.
The God of Self is pleased, but his appetite is nowhere near satiated.
It is as has been pre-ordained: only a beginning. No matter how small, the God of Self understands, every religion requires its congregation. Every Supreme Being demands worship — endless, unconditional worship — or he cannot, by definition, be divine.
In the nurses’ station, Sally’s shift mates have heard the commotion. They head down the hail to investigate.
On the drive back to Boston two grandchildren abruptly pull off the road. Without a word of discussion, they turn the car around.
Asleep, Grandma has a compelling dream. In the morning, she will ask her chauffeur to prepare for the trip north.
Inebriated after the party she has attended, his daughter feels sudden pangs of guilt. Crying, she vows to her equally drunk husband that they will make the drive tomorrow morning in time for Christmas dinner, come hell or highwater. She cannot explain the urge to bring candles, but she will bring them.
There are many others, too: former work colleagues, gold buddies, a barber, a lawyer, beautiful women.
Omniscient, he knows all this. He is greatly pleased.
Secure in his temple, the God of Self rests from what he has created and sanctified, and looks forward to the dawning of a bright and glorious new day.